Sequels can be just as bad as their predecessors, and we’re in the midst of another unfortunate one. On Monday at the 78th Emmy Awards, in the lead and supporting races for drama and comedy, in addition to lead actor and actress in a limited series, all 10 actors who crossed the stage came from outside an underrepresented community. The other two, supporting actor and actress in a limited series, which were handed out a week earlier at the Creative Arts ceremonies, shifted off the main show this year in a reshuffling of five categories that drew Hollywood’s guilds’ ire, but did not change the math.
The only performers of color to win an on-camera or voice Emmy this cycle also did so at the Creative Arts. Ernest Harden Jr. won guest actor in a drama for the medical series “The Pitt” on HBO Max, and Octavia Spencer won for narrating “Lost Women of Alaska.” It should be noted that behind the camera, the comedy directing prize went to Japanese American filmmaker Hiro Murai for Apple TV’s horror comedy “Widow’s Bay,” making him the first Asian director to win the category and only the third Asian director to win an Emmy in any category, after Lee Sung Jin for “Beef” and Hwang Dong-hyuk for “Squid Game.” By Variety’s count, 17 performers of color were nominated in the lead and supporting acting races this year, down from 28 a year ago, a 39% decline. The figure for actors and hosts of color peaked in 2021 at 49, the last time the field produced #EmmysSoWhite.
Every awards show is at a crossroads. Viewership is sliding, and the industry does not always hear what its audience is telling it. The push for diversity is still meeting hostility in some quarters of Hollywood, especially as it spills into the political sector.
Or, worse yet, everyone is willfully misreading what it all means. Awards nights, for better or worse, are when we see these tensions play out in the public square. And believe it, people notice.
Frustration over the absence of winning actors of color is felt across social media, and those voices can be the loudest among the creative community itself. But for the Television Academy, the issue is bound up in the machinery: who among its 20,000-plus members gets to vote on what and how those votes are cast. Layered on top is the “Too Much TV” problem, a field so vast it may be outrunning the voters.
Who has the time to weigh all of it? This year’s ballot drew from 110 drama series, down from 126 in 2025; 71 comedies, up slightly from 69; 31 limited series, down from 33; and 34 television movies, down from 39. The Academy pulled its nominees from 555 program submissions across the 14 program categories, down from 600, a drop of about 7.5%.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
